‘It’s not going to work,’ Dot says, banging her fist on the table. ‘You have to trust me on this, it simply won’t work. It’ll be a waste of money and effort if we rush into it now.’
Alyssa, who, like Dot, has a sense of the dramatic and enjoys large gestures, sighs noisily and throws her arms in the air in exasperation. ‘So you’re saying we just put everything on hold, stop the campaign and go off and paint our toenails until after the summer holidays?’
They are gathered around the cluttered table in the house that Alyssa and two of the others share, three blocks down from Dot’s own home. As well as Dot, Alyssa and her housemates, Karen and Lucy, there is Sam, an internet studies student who built the original CASE website, Alyssa’s mother Jean, and Lexie, who has also enlisted Wendy. There is an awkward silence around the table as everyone watches Dot and Alyssa, two drama queens who both hate to lose an argument. Lexie wonders how long the stand-off will last and whether this is how all the meetings have been so far.
‘I’m not suggesting that you paint your toenails, Alyssa,’ Dot says. ‘I’m not even suggesting that we take time off from the campaign, I’m simply saying we should use the time to plan it properly. Yes, we need to have an attention grabbing event of some sort, but we can’t do it in a shopping centre just before Christmas.’
‘But if we get in there a couple of weeks before Christmas we’ll get the crowds, people will have to take notice because we’ll make it chaotic.’
‘Exactly. We’ll be a nuisance.’
‘Isn’t that how a protest works?’ Alyssa says, her voice rising. ‘You make a nuisance of yourself so that people have to take notice of you.’
‘But there are times when it just won’t work,’ Dot says. ‘Like in those last frantic weeks before Christmas when people are busy and harassed, trying to finish their shopping. They’ll just be pissed off – it’ll do us more harm than good.’
‘I’m with Alyssa,’ Sam says. ‘We do something asap. Stuff moves fast on the Net and we don’t want to lose momentum.’
‘Then perhaps you should come up with another way to keep up the online momentum over the holiday period,’ Wendy says, ‘but I’m with Dot on this.’
‘I say do it now,’ says Karen, smiling at Alyssa.
‘You would,’ Dot says crisply. ‘You always do what Alyssa tells you.’
Karen flushes. ‘I do not.’
‘You do so,’ Lucy cuts in. ‘I think Dot’s right. Christmas is the worst time for it.’
‘But it isn’t just Christmas,’ Alyssa says. ‘If we don’t do it before Christmas then there’s the Boxing Day and New Year sales. Next you’ll be telling us don’t do it in the school holidays. We need to show the bank we can actually do something so they’ll give us the money.’
‘Have you guys ever actually organised a protest?’ Dot asks. ‘Have you actually taken part in one?’
Alyssa throws her arms in the air again and does some more exasperated sighing. ‘Not exactly . . .’
‘Dot’s right, Alyssa,’ Jean says. ‘She knows what she’s talking about.’
Lexie, whose frustration with the way things are going is obvious from her expression, leans forward. ‘Look, I think we’re having the wrong conversation,’ she says. ‘You’ve done a great job setting this up. Dot’s blog and that crazy little video have taken it to another level, and now the bank is interested in sponsoring CASE. But you don’t have a plan and without a plan you’ll never get the money. I’m not sure you’re even clear about what you’re trying to achieve.’
‘We want to stop it,’ Alyssa says angrily ‘stop the exploitation, stop the standards of the sex industry wheedling their ways into kids’ imaginations, and dictating what it is to be a woman. There’s no way kids or teenagers can get away from these images and messages. That’s what we’re about.’
‘Exactly,’ Dot says. ‘At least we agree on that.’
‘And how are you going to do that?’
Alyssa sighs again. ‘Raising public awareness, of course.’
‘So how will you know when you’ve done enough of that, and how are you going to direct it? Where are you going to channel all the awareness and support you get?’ Lexie asks.
There is silence around the table as people doodle on their pads, shift in their seats and exchange embarrassed glances.
‘Look,’ Lexie says, ‘you asked us here to help decide on a proposal for the bank, but before you can do that you need a business plan and a campaign strategy, you need to know what you’re aiming for in practical terms. What are your key performance indicators? How are you going to best spend whatever money you can get? How are you going to use the people who have signed up for the email lists, or those who are volunteering to help? You have nothing other than your energy, the original idea and a vague plan for a protest. None of that will convince the bank that sponsoring CASE would be a good use of its money.’
There is a moment of acute embarrassment and discomfort around the table, followed by mumblings of agreement. Dot and Alyssa glare at each other but stay silent.
‘This has to be fought on several different fronts,’ Lexie goes on. ‘Governments, the magazine industry, the music industry, entertainment, fashion. It’s huge, it takes money, time and organisation. You’ve got to get serious, demonstrate that you know how to develop it, not just throw together some event to make a splash.’
‘She’s right,’ Wendy says. ‘This meeting – these petty arguments – are a waste of time and energy. You can keep this thing ticking along and not really going anywhere and people will drop off and lose interest, but if you want this to fly really high you’ve got to get serious and get organised now.’
There is a murmur of agreement.
‘And there’s one more thing,’ Lexie says. ‘Why a protest in a shopping centre? For lots of women shopping centres are a source of pleasure, even if they can’t afford to shop. You’re not going to get those women on side by attacking the places they go to escape. Sorry, Dot, I know you tried it with the chains, but I think a shopping centre is a bad move. Keep the stuff going online, and if you want an event you need a good old-fashioned rally. Perhaps in one of the parks. Some rousing speeches and maybe something happening when it’s over – invite everyone to bring a picnic and listen to a women’s choir, or something like that. Simple but big, and well organised, the way our mothers and grandmothers did it. They knew how to do those things, they kept doing it and it worked. It worked then and it can work now. Back to the future!’
‘Sure you won’t come in?’ Wendy says later as Lexie pulls up outside the house. ‘There’s some soup I can heat up.’
Lexie shakes her head. ‘No thanks, I said I’d go to Patrick’s. He’s cooking, although the thought of what I’ve just committed myself to is enough to put me off the idea of food.’
‘Mmm, I was surprised,’ Wendy says, ‘but you were terrific, Lex, and it really does need someone to get behind the wheel.’
Behind the wheel is exactly where Lexie knows she has positioned herself by agreeing to write the business plan and more or less manage the campaign. And while it made sense to her, even seemed exciting, during the meeting, she wonders now whether she’s taken on too much. She’s been enjoying this time without working; it’s years since she took a proper holiday, or even had some time at home to relax, and that, plus the freedom of living alone, have made her feel as though she is slowly emerging from a chrysalis. Patrick, she knows, has been a big part of that but, burnt by the past, she still feels the need to proceed with caution. Lexie doesn’t like the sort of person she had become with Ross, the one who holds it altogether, who struggles to make it work, who fills the gaps in their emotional and social lives. And who ends up feeling resentful because it is all so onesided. Being that person sapped her spirit and work became the only thing that could revive her. Never again, she has promised herself, and so far it seems to be working, but she doesn’t quite trust it yet, or perhaps it’s that she doesn’t quite trust herself.
Patrick is making pasta when she arrives, the smell of the sauce is wafting out through the screen door which he has left unlocked for her, and her first thought is that although she’s not in the least bit hungry, she’s going to have to eat it in order not to hurt his feelings. Unlike Lexie herself, Patrick is an excellent and enthusiastic cook – the food, she knows, will be delicious – but he’s a man, and her experience of men cooking is that the meal is served with the expectation that it will be received with a sense of wonder. Considerable creative effort is needed to come up with enough different forms of praise to last throughout the eating of it, and declining a second helping will be seen as criticism, while failure to round it off with a statement liberally scattered with superlatives could cause a stand-off, even an argument. But all that is nothing compared to not wanting to eat at all – that’s a declaration of war.
She pauses, hand hovering above the door handle, and the evening ahead just seems like hard work. She’s heading into so much that’s new and she’s too confused about what she’s doing and why to have to do all that business of propping up another person’s ego. This, she reminds herself, is what it’s like to be in a relationship. You don’t want this, Lexie, she tells herself, you really don’t. Cut and run now, while you still can. She hesitates, then turns quietly away from the door.
‘Come on in, it’s open,’ Patrick calls from the kitchen.
Lexie’s heart sinks and, compelled by the habit of a lifetime, she takes a deep breath and opens the door.
‘Sorry I’m so late,’ she says. ‘It all got a bit out of hand.’
Patrick puts down his spoon. ‘It’s fine,’ he says. ‘From what Dot and Alyssa have, separately, told me I guessed you might be walking into quicksand. Here,’ he pours a glass of wine and hands it to her, ‘sit down, tell me what happened. Dinner won’t be long.’
Lexie sits at the already laid table and sips her wine, thankful at least that he knows about CASE and the idiosyncrasies of the people involved. ‘You won’t believe what I’ve let myself in for,’ she says, and begins to describe the tensions of the meeting, and her own intervention. ‘So right now I feel like kicking myself. Driving this thing is a whole lot of work that I don’t need, and managing Dot and Alyssa is probably going to be a nightmare.’
Patrick pulls the pan from the heat and joins her at the table. ‘You’ll do a wonderful job, though,’ he says, ‘and you’re just what they need.’
‘Maybe, but is it what I need? Right now I’m having a terrible attack of cold feet. I’d just talked myself out of the need to be the one who runs things and now I’ve volunteered for this.’
‘Right now you’re tired,’ Patrick says, ‘and you’re also thinking you’re on your own. You’re not, I’m here. I know quite a lot about it already – Alyssa’s got me well and truly sucked in. I can help if you want me to, we can do it together.’
‘Really?’
He laughs. ‘Of course. It’ll be fun – or at least some of it will be fun and the rest will be a nightmare, but I think we could manage it.’
Lexie hesitates. ‘Ross wouldn’t even have listened to what I’ve been saying,’ she says. ‘His eyes would have glazed over ten minutes ago.’
‘So?’
‘It was like he tuned out of anything that wasn’t one of his things – his job, the music he liked, the footy. He used to claim that he was a good listener but his eyes would begin to drift away and he’d stop listening almost as soon as I started to say something.’
Patrick is silent a moment. ‘I’m not Ross, Lexie,’ he says in a low voice, ‘and I am interested in what you’re doing. But most of all I’m interested in you, because in case you haven’t noticed, I’m in love with you. So how about you start letting go of some of those assumptions and seeing me for who I am instead of who I’m not?’
Lexie stops breathing. It’s as though the breath is trapped high in her chest and may choke her. Patrick puts up a hand and strokes her face.
‘Now,’ he says, getting up and crossing back to the stove. ‘Dinner, you must be starving.’
She still can’t speak, and he looks back, waiting for a reply, and sees the expression on her face.
‘Ah!’ he says. ‘You’re not, are you? The last thing you want is food.’ He flicks the switch to off, turns out the light on the range hood, comes back to the table and, taking her hand, pulls her to her feet and wraps his arms around her. And they stand together holding each other for what seems like quite a long time.
‘The thing is,’ Patrick says eventually, ‘I know you’re not hungry and that’s fine. But I’m starving and could eat enough for both of us. Why don’t you pour us some more wine and we can talk this CASE thing through while I pig out.’
It’s quite late when Emma leaves the beauty salon. Theresa’s handiwork has lifted her spirits and she stops off to buy some pantyhose and body lotion. There is, she thinks, a luxurious sort of naughtiness about evening shopping, as though it’s something that really ought to be forbidden. The temptation to make the most of it is overwhelming and before she knows it she’s on her way back to the car with a pair of designer jeans that were on sale and a black t-shirt. The house is almost in darkness when she gets home, but it’s clear that Phyllida is in and watching television in the lounge with the light of just one table lamp.
‘Bit dark in here,’ Emma says, popping her head around the door. ‘Sorry I’m so late, but you just have to see what Theresa did. It’s such a relief.’ And she snaps on another lamp and looks at Phyllida. ‘What do you think? I feel like a normal human being again.’
Phyllida looks up, squinting against the sudden light. ‘Mmm . . . good,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it’s much better.’
Emma thinks her aunt looks a bit odd, tired probably. ‘And look,’ she says, tipping out the contents of her bags. ‘I got these divine jeans, they fit perfectly, twenty per cent off – don’t you love the cut? And this t-shirt, it doesn’t look much like this but it’s really stunning on, you see it has one bare shoulder, and the other shoulder is covered and it has this long sleeve.’ She holds up the t-shirt so Phyllida can see it. ‘Theresa says that the cosmetic surgeon does a fantastic eyebrow lift, and I might ask him about my chin – well, at least this sort of thick bit just beneath it. What do you think?’
Phyllida gets up and tosses the remote control onto the coffee table. She’s looking different now, not just tired but grumpy or upset perhaps.
‘What I think,’ she says, crossing to the door, ‘is that if you go to a cosmetic surgeon and ask him what he can do to your eyebrows and your chin, he will draw all over you in texta, add in a couple more essential procedures and charge you a couple of hundred dollars to tell you how much more money he can take off you. And it’s irrelevant because you can’t afford it, Emma, you don’t have the money. So I suggest you cancel the appointment and pay the two hundred dollars or whatever it would have cost into my account as the first repayment on the money I loaned you.’
‘Well, but I . . .’
‘Emma, dear,’ Phyllida says with chilly calm, ‘all those years ago when I bought you your first Barbie doll I didn’t intend for you to use it as a role model. It never occurred to me that you would but I see now that I was wrong.’
And with that she stalks out of the room and upstairs to her bedroom, and Emma hears the door slam followed by the sound of the television. She sinks down onto the sofa, her face burning. Phyllida’s remarks and the tone in which she made them seemed designed to hurt and they have. Emma feels as she did back in the playground, being jeered at for stuff about her father that she didn’t understand, and for some time she just sits there on the sofa gazing at the mute images on the screen, wondering what had happened, what Phyllida had meant and why she had attacked her like that.
She goes to the kitchen, makes some toast, and as she sits down again in front of the television her spirits lift as Ten Years Younger in Ten Days is just about to start. For almost an hour she watches two people being criticised and sniggered at by strangers for the way they look, then being patronised by stylists, hairdressers, beauty experts, and finally tweezed, nipped, tucked, drilled and buffed. It’s wonderfully reassuring to Emma to see how, in just a few days, a person can be totally transformed. And by the time the victims are fully made over she herself is feeling very much better. She turns off the television, puts her plate in the dishwasher and goes up to bed, but without the distraction of the television the makeover fix begins to wear off. An image of Barbie dangles in Emma’s consciousness like an irritating ornament on a driving mirror, and once again she is back in the playground with all the hurt, the confusion and the shame; most of all the shame.
‘Phyl not around then?’ Grant asks the next morning when he comes to drop Rosie off for the weekend.
‘She’s still in her room,’ Emma says, pouring water into the coffee plunger. ‘She seems a bit out of sorts.’ She is still feeling wobbly from Phyllida’s strange attitude to her the previous evening, and the restless night that followed.
‘I could go and cheer her up,’ Rosie says, heading out of the kitchen.
‘Best not, darling,’ Emma says, ‘she might still be asleep. You’ll see her later, when we get back from shopping with Grandma.’
Rosie heaves a huge sigh. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘But I’m sure I could make her feel better.’ And she opens the door to the garden. ‘I’m going to look for dead birds.’
Grant’s mouth twitches in a smile and he looks at Emma. ‘I guess this obsession with dead birds could be considered a bit sick but I think it’s rather cute.’
Emma nods and pushes the plunger and a mug towards him across the bench top. ‘I suppose, but then I’m no expert on child development.’
‘Ouch! Was that a dig at me or just you being down on yourself?’ Grant asks.
Emma shrugs. ‘The latter, of course. You are, after all, a saint, as my mother and aunt keep reminding me.’ As the words fall from her lips Emma wonders where this is going, why her vulnerability this morning has turned into something bitter without her knowing it.
Grant looks down into his coffee and says nothing. Eventually he lifts his cup, drinks and looks up at her. ‘Is this about something specific I’ve done, or is it general angst?’ he asks.
Emma sighs; it’s his face that’s hurting her. The face she fell in love with – well, not just his face, his whole self, sitting there opposite her now just being himself, being Grant, with whom she had once been happier than at any other time in her life, and with whom she now always feels her sense of inadequacy more acutely than with anyone else, even Rosie. Most of the time she can handle it, but this morning, destabilised and confused by Phyllida’s chillingly critical manner, she is on the brink of tears.
‘Neither,’ she says, looking up at Grant. ‘It is specifically about something else, I’m just taking it out on you.’
‘Okay,’ he says, nodding slowly. ‘Okay. Well, would it help if I leave now?’
She shakes her head. ‘No. Sorry. I’m pulling my head in right now.’
‘Do you want to –’
‘No,’ she says again, cutting across him. ‘I definitely don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Right, then why don’t we take our coffee outside in the sun with Rosie?’ he says. And picking up his mug he holds the door open for her. ‘You’re far too hard on yourself, Em,’ he says as she walks past him. ‘Why don’t you cut yourself a bit of slack.’
And Emma, usually resentful of the accuracy with which he can still read her moods, now feels an overwhelming urge to confide in him. It’s an urge she manages to keep in check.
‘It’s complicated,’ Margot says later, while they’re sitting on a seat in the Central Park mall, watching Rosie bouncing up and down on the bumpy castle. ‘Phyl’s had a few nasty shocks,’ and she fills Emma in on the existence of May Wong and the missing money. ‘I want you to talk to her, Em, tell her that you know. She needs someone to confide in and she trusts you more than anyone.’
‘This is weird,’ Emma says. ‘Uncle Donald with a mistress! I can’t believe it. I can’t imagine anyone ever actually wanting to sleep with him, can you?’
Margot allows herself a twitch of a smile. ‘Frankly no, I can’t. In fact I couldn’t even imagine it the first day Phyl brought him home to meet Mum and Dad. But there you go, there’s no accounting for taste.’
‘But she’ll have a fit if she knows you’ve told me.’
‘She’ll be mad at me, but she’ll get over it. It’ll be a relief to have someone on hand to talk to and you really are the best person to listen. She’s shocked and hurt, but the worst thing is that she’s embarrassed and ashamed.’
‘But it’s not her fault,’ Emma says. ‘She’s got nothing to feel ashamed of.’
‘You and I know that,’ Margot says, ‘but all Phyl can see is that she’s been made a fool of by someone she loved and trusted. Everything she believed about her marriage and their life together has been trashed. Donald has made her look ridiculous and no, it’s not her fault, but it doesn’t stop her feeling hurt and ashamed. You can help her, Em.’
Emma hesitates, this is not a task she relishes. ‘Okay,’ she says eventually. ‘Okay, if you think so I’ll give it a go.’
Laurence is packing books – Bernard’s books. He is putting them carefully into boxes, sealing them and sticking on the labels with Bernard’s address in Ho Chi Minh City. Then he carries them, one at a time, out into the hall and adds them to the pile ready for the courier who will collect them tomorrow morning. It is a painful task; with each box he closes he imagines Bernard opening it, slitting the tape with a knife, folding back the flaps, lifting out each book with that wonderful sense of rediscovering things one so often forgets about when they are on the shelf. Will Bernard think of him as he unpacks the books? Will he imagine Laurence’s hands holding them, stroking them lovingly? Will he remember his touch, as Laurence now remembers Bernard’s touch? But of course Bernard will not be thinking like this because for him it is over, he has chosen another life. Has Bernard found someone new? Apparently not, but then how would Laurence know? He has no spy network in Ho Chi Minh City.
They had met the year he turned forty and Bernard, just twenty-three, approached him to supervise his PhD, because of his work on Henry James. From the moment Bernard walked into the office Laurence knew that his lifelong struggle to suppress his true nature was about to face its greatest ever challenge. The smart thing, of course, would have been to decline and send Bernard to someone else, but of course he didn’t. And in the end it was Bernard who was the first to declare his feelings and Laurence had counselled that for both their sakes these feelings should not be acted on. The Campaign Against Moral Persecution had been established in Sydney in 1970 and its Melbourne branch, Society Five, a year later, but homosexuality was still illegal.
‘It’s your career and mine,’ Laurence remembers saying at the time. ‘The risks are enormous, and I have to think of Margot and the girls.’
‘But this is who you are,’ Bernard had told him, ‘who you’ve always been. Are you really prepared to spend the rest of your life living a lie?’
The truth of Bernard’s challenge that day had freed Laurence from the masquerade and enabled him to grow and work in ways he had never dreamed possible. Before that, however, it had cost him his job. Once he had left Margot and the news filtered out, Laurence knew his card was marked. Sleeping with students, even mature adults, was a disastrous career move especially, as the Dean had pointed out, when it was ‘illegal fornication’. Bernard completed his thesis and together they set off for a few years to Prague and later to Paris, and by the time they came home Australia had moved on.
And now Bernard has moved on; he wants the challenge of somewhere new and eventually perhaps someone new, while Laurence, almost seventy-five, wants to cling to the present, to preserve what he has or had. He wants the intimacy and tender comforts of familiar love, the cosy irritation of having his sentences finished by someone younger, the peace and the tension of living daily with the rough and the smooth of a partner for whom, until now, he has always come first. For this he left Margot devastated and bewildered with her life in shreds, left his daughters hurt and confused, and now it is over and he’s alone.
In hindsight wisdom about the age gap comes easily, Laurence thinks as he adds a box to the stack in the hall. Years ago he had worried that the age difference would be a problem, that they would find they no longer had enough in common to keep them together, or that as he got older Bernard would find him boring, distasteful or just plain dull. But somehow he had assumed that if it was going to happen it would have done so long ago and he had ceased to worry. He had come to inhabit the comforting assumption that they would go peaceably on together forever. And now here he is, an old man alone in an empty house, where half the bookshelves are empty of books, half the wardrobe is empty of clothes and half the bed is still and cold. An old man too sad, too frightened, too shamed by loss to seek comfort by sharing his grief, and who feels he has hurt others too much to expect anyone to care.
Laurence is not normally given to self-pity but it is hard to avoid it in his present situation. He would like something positive to do, something that would force him to focus on reorganising his life, something to distract him into action. He needs to come out about this just as he came out about his sexuality years ago, but so far he hasn’t been able to take the first step, and the longer he leaves it the harder it seems.
He tapes up another box, attaches the label and carries it slowly to the hall, leaning back against the front door just as someone rings the bell and follows the ring with the thump of a fist. Briefly Laurence considers not answering, standing stock still, holding his breath, pretending not to be there. Whoever it is rings the bell again, more aggressively this time.
‘Come on, Laurence,’ a familiar voice calls. ‘I know you’re there – I saw you walk past the window. Open up.’
Dot, dressed in her trademark black, this time a sleeveless linen dress with an emerald silk scarf, is standing on the doorstep taking a last drag on a cigarette.
‘No good hiding from me,’ she says with a grin. ‘Let me in – oh sorry, I’ll put it out.’ And she drops the cigarette on the step, grinds it out with her foot and retrieves the stub. ‘Where will I dump this?’
Laurence opens the door wider and she steps inside and reaches up to kiss his cheek.
‘Haven’t you given up that disgusting habit yet?’ he says, taking the butt from her and leading her through to the back of the house and out to the terrace, where a few moths are darting around the citronella lamps.
‘Not quite,’ Dot says. ‘I keep trying. I cut it down a lot when I was in India. I can make a packet last a week now. By the time I get it to zero I’ll have died of something else.’ She hands him a bottle of red wine and he studies the label.
‘Grange!’ he says, looking at her over the top of his glasses. ‘I’m impressed. What are we celebrating?’
‘We’re not celebrating,’ Dot says, ‘we’re commiserating. Well, I am commiserating with you.’ She nods towards the mess of books spread on the floor, the boxes in the hall. ‘You’re packing Bernard’s books.’
‘Oh well – yes, he needs a few. They want him to stay on a bit longer.’
‘Bullshit,’ Dot says, sitting down. ‘He’s gone for good. I bumped into his sister when I was getting petrol. She told me.’
‘Ah!’
‘Yes, ah! Go and get a corkscrew and some glasses.’
Laurence sighs, puts the bottle on the table, pads back into the kitchen and returns to open the wine. ‘How long have you known?’
‘Yesterday morning. And I know he left before you went on your pilgrimage. Did all that walking and spiritual self-flagellation help?’
Laurence feels as though his body is resisting a weight greater than he can manage and he sits down abruptly, pushing the bottle and the corkscrew towards Dot. ‘You open it,’ he says. ‘I don’t know really; weeks of walking unprepared in the heat was torture, far too much time to think about the past, the wreck of my life, and the way I’ve wrecked other lives. The most I can say is that there was some satisfaction in actually completing it.’
‘And you haven’t told anyone?’
‘Not a soul.’
‘Not even Margot?’
He shakes his head. ‘I keep intending to but I always chicken out. I caused her enormous grief and great hardship – coming out, the scandal at the university, the financial problems, the burden of bringing up the girls. And now it ends like this. It almost seems like an insult to her.’
‘Bollocks,’ Dot says. ‘You and Bernard lasted thirty-four years. It’s not as though you left Margot for a meaningless fling. And it would have come out some other way; you can’t spend your life trying to pass as something you’re not. Of course it was bloody dreadful for Margot but you’re assuming that she still thinks she could have had a better life if you’d continued to do your straight man act.’
‘Well I think she’d have been better off if we hadn’t got married.’
Dot pours the wine, pushes a glass towards him.
‘You did the honourable thing and that was really important to her at the time. I’d bet that it still is now. Lord knows what would have happened to her if you’d done a disappearing trick or sent her to some sleazy backstreet abortionist. And you have the girls. I don’t know how much that means to you, Laurence, but it means the world to Margot. Cheers.’
‘Cheers. Yes, it means the world to me too.’
‘She’s fond of you, Laurence. She loves you – not in the old way, but she knows who you are, she respects that. I probably shouldn’t be attempting to read her mind but I don’t think she’ll see this as an insult. She’ll be sad for you, but she does need to hear it from you first, not learn it from someone else.’
He nods. ‘You’re right,’ he says, sipping his wine.
‘Good. I know about these things, of course, thanks to my vast experience of satisfying long-term relationships,’ and she lets out a hoot of laughter.
Laurence almost chokes on his wine and they both laugh aloud, released now from the emotional tension.
‘Don’t you ever regret it?’
‘What?’
‘Well it does seem as though you’ve spent most of your life alone or in relationships that you chose for their obvious temporariness.’
She shrugs. ‘I was never into the marriage and happy families stuff – missing gene maybe. And anyway, who’d put up with me?’
‘So no regrets?’
‘You can’t get to our age without some regrets, can you? I mean I’d love to be able to say I’m such a free spirit that I regret nothing, but it wouldn’t be true.’
Laurence nods. ‘Byron Bay nineteen sixty-six? We’ve never talked about it but I’ve often wanted to ask you how you feel now, all these years later.’
‘Secret women’s business,’ Dot says.
He picks up the bottle of wine. ‘I thought you’d spent a fortune on this very fine wine so we could share our secrets.’
‘I didn’t buy it, it was a gift, and it’s been sitting in the rack for some time. I decided we’d drink it tonight so that you could tell me your secrets, not prise mine open.’
She takes a long breath and sits for a moment, unmoving, staring at a moth that comes back time and again in an attempt to reach the light. ‘Okay, yes I do think about it. There are times when I’ve felt haunted by it and, yes, occasionally I regret it. But they’re the regrets of age, part of getting old and living in the last chance café, looking back and seeing how I could have done it differently. But I didn’t know that then, and I don’t dwell on it now – only when, perhaps, I’m a bit maudlin and self-indulgent. It soon passes and present reality seems pretty good. We’re still alive, Laurence, vertical, independent, our friends still speak to us, we even have our own teeth – that can’t be bad for three-score years and fifteen!’ And she pushes her glass towards him. ‘More please, and I need something to soak it up. Shall we dial a pizza?’
Laurence refills their glasses and makes the call.
‘There’s something else,’ Dot says, ‘another reason I needed to talk to you. You know this campaign that Margot and Lexie and I are involved in?’
‘Of course, I’m avidly reading your blog, very reminiscent of the old ratbag Dot, terrific stuff.’
‘Good. Well I need you to get involved too.’
‘Me? I know nothing about it. I mean, I support you absolutely. If it’s money you want I’m happy to make a donation.’
Dot shakes her head. ‘I’m not asking for your money, although of course I’ll take whatever you want to give. But what I really want is your time, your analytical skills and your advice.’
Laurence raises his eyebrows. ‘Really? You have an opening for a grumpy old man with a background in literary criticism?’
‘Exactly! Lexie, who turns out to be a brilliant strategic thinker and an absolute stickler for detail, has pointed out that if we are going to take this thing to the next level we need to be really well prepared. She’s taking over, preparing a business plan, and working with Alyssa on some projects to take to the bank. But we need to do some research – facts, figures and strong arguments, some idea of what’s happening elsewhere – the US, the UK. Margot’s on the committee but I don’t want to ask her to do this, because after all these years she’s finally into her writing. I thought you might be willing to help.’
Laurence stares thoughtfully out across the darkness of the garden, considering his loneliness, his apathy, his unwillingness to do anything other than mope and feel sorry for himself. It’s been going on too long, so long it has become a habit, so long that the effort to involve himself in something new seems monumental. He wonders if he is clinically depressed or whether this is just a normal state of grief. Either way, he thinks, the only way to shift himself out of it is to get involved in something that will occupy his time and perhaps jolt him out of gloom.
‘Okay,’ he says, turning back to Dot. ‘I imagine I can get to grips with that and it might stop me wallowing in self-pity. When do you want me to start?’
‘How about tonight?’ Dot says with a grin. ‘I’ve got a heap of stuff in the car. I can talk you through what we’re doing after we’ve had our pizza.’